Understanding Affective Computing and the Future of Sousveillance Architecture
There is much wisdom in this book that can help computer scientists and laypersons understand the human brain.
If you care about privacy, now's your chance to let the industry know how you feel. (And, no, I'm not calling for new laws or regulations.) Tell them that RFID tags are perfectly acceptable inside stores to track pallets and crates, but that if retailers wish to use them on consumer goods, they should follow four voluntary guidelines.
First, consumers should be notified--a notice on a checkout receipt would work--when RFID tags are present in what they're buying. Second, RFID tags should be disabled by default at the checkout counter. Third, RFID tags should be placed on the product's packaging instead of on the product when possible. Fourth, RFID tags should be readily visible and easily removable.
Given RFID's potential for tracking your every move, is that too much to ask?
A year ago, a group of patients was so desperate to document living
conditions that they sneaked a disposable camera into the hospital.
Their pictures showed steel beds crammed into dirty, crowded rooms,
filthy toilets, torn furniture, broken sinks, and portable bathrooms
in the outdoor yard overflowing with urine and feces.
Those who followed the "artistic" view of the SI might view the evolution of SI as producing a more boring or dogmatic organization. Those following the political view would see the May 1968 uprisings as a logical outcome of the SI's dialectical approach: while savaging present day society, they sought a revolutionary society which would embody the positive tendencies of capitalist development. The "realization and suppression of Art" is simply the most developed of the many supercessions which the SI sought over the years. For Situationist International of 1968, the world triumph of workers councils would bring about all these supercessions
"Contemporary civilization differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. The change has come about within a generation," noted the historian Marc Bloch, writing in the nineteen-thirties. This situation brings in its wake a second feature: the accident. The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations. Daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out of the blue, so to speak. In a shattered mirror, we must then learn to discern what is impending more and more often-but above all more and more quickly, those events coming upon us inopportunely, if not indeed simultaneously. Faced with an accelerated temporality which affects mores and Art as much as it does international politics, there is one particularly urgent necessity: to expose and to exhibit the Time accident.